Kali Reis on a gut-wrenching True Detective: Night Country

True Detective: Night Country is 2024’s first great TV show, a phenom that it’s safe to say has reignited HBO’s Sunday night lineup. It’s also a return to form considering how the series memorably stumbled after its stellar first season. Helmed and written by Issa López, the fourth season of the show, Night Country, is a creepy, chilling, atmospheric affair that, among other perks, teams up legendary actor Jodie Foster with breakout star and boxer Kali Reis. They play the tormented titular detectives here, Liz Danvers and Evangeline Navarro, respectively.

Despite falling out over a previous case, the duo attempts to pair up again to solve a dark mystery in their small Alaskan town. But aside from all the suspense, Night Country is also a very emotional show, as evidenced in episode four, which aired February 4 and finds Navarro having to contend with her sister’s suicide and her resulting breakdown. The A.V. Club spoke to Reis about filming the gut-wrenching scenes in last night’s installment, playing off Foster, and how Night Country compares to True Detective’s first season.

Kali Reis: It was about two years ago when I first learned about True Detective coming back. I didn’t know about any of Issa López’s work at the time. I’ve thankfully learned all about it since then. I did audition for the part. I spoke to Issa about her work first, and my own, which isn’t much. This is my third job as an actor because I have a boxing background. When she described what she was doing with Night Country, Evangeline Navarro, and Liz Danvers, and when I got the chance to read the pilot, I was captivated. We had conversations about her previous work involving missing women. She’s a Mexican from Mexico City and makes a point of including the epidemic of missing women in her stories. That felt familiar to my experiences and to my previous work.

Something that intrigued me about Navarro was she’s a part of the Iñupiaq Alaskan native community. She’s also Dominican. She has a dual background as I do, and I understand feeling like you’re not good enough for either side. Me and Navarro share a passion for fighting for what’s right and for justice. It’s one of Evangeline’s main principles, to find the truth. I call Navarro a badass with a big heart. Her true strength is her vulnerability. When you watch the series and go on this journey with her, you see what she’s fearing is actually her biggest strength. I liked that Issa involved the audience in it. I liked that Navarro is layered. You don’t know what she’s thinking. She’s intuitive yet acts on her feelings; it doesn’t matter if it lines up with Danvers’ logical thinking. She’s spiritual if you want to call it that.

AVC: What conversations did you have with Issa about portraying Navarro’s evolution as she embraces her truth, especially in the intensely emotional episode four?

KR: I don’t have a “process” as an actor, per se, but I do come from an artist background. Boxing is an art. Issa and I spoke a lot about how deep Navarro is. How tortured she is and how much she tries to run away from things that her sister is involved in. She’s like a mother to her sister. Another aspect of Navarro is she never found out what happened to her mother, who got ripped from her, even though her mother scared the crap out of her.

We wanted to take Navarro apart with this and have the pieces intertwine into one thing. She’s clearly tough and strong, she has a police and military background, but who is she emotionally? We talked about breaking that down such that it’s not right in your face. There’s a scene where she has to go through a riot, and that’s also emotional for her. There’s so much simmering beneath the surface with Navarro. Our goal was to let the audience get into her head without her having to say it all.

I will also say that in episode four, I loved her relationship with her sister, Julia. I can say we knew going into the show that it would be the only thing to keep Navarro from acting right and not crossing over and fully giving in. It’s holding her together [until it’s not].

AVC: It’s incredibly moving as Navarro deals with her sister’s death. Was this one of the more challenging things to film?

KR: I think the physical part of it was the most interesting for me. It was fun to learn, or rather unlearn, what I know as a fighter, and have that translated into a theatrical interpretation of her dealing with the pain. All Navarro wants is to feel something. She just lost the one thing holding her together, so I would say the scene when she says out loud to Danvers that her sister is dead is the first time she’s able to say it. That was heavy. Something interesting about Danvers and Navarro’s relationship is how they bring out parts of each other that no one else can. So, with Navarro dealing with this, she is intuitive. She needs to act instantly even if it means doing something outrageous. I thought it was interesting she’s not going into a bar and drinking the pain away.

AVC: How will Julia’s death affect Navarro in the next couple of episodes?

KR: Episode four is heavy for Navarro but she still has that driving force to find out what’s right. But now, she’s going to die trying to find out if that’s what she has to do. She has questions like “My sister is gone, what happened?” and “What happened to my mother?” Her goals are: I need to find out. I need to get the answers. I need to fix it.

AVC: With Navarro and Danvers’ partnership, what was it like to work with Jodie Foster and establish the dynamic with her?

KR: Oh, man. Jodie, Jodie, Jodie. She is one of the most fascinating, intelligent women I’ve had the pleasure to meet and work with, especially this early in my career. I have Issa, who created this masterpiece, and even to see both of them work together was a pleasure. We had a collaborative sisterhood to get here. It wasn’t like we were in different places. Jodie was interested in my process, and I was like “I don’t have one, but it’s great you want to call it that.” She wanted to know how I developed and approached Navarro. With the trust Issa gave both of us to develop our characters, it was helpful to learn what Jodie was bringing to Danvers.

Even during the journey through shooting the whole season, we found different dynamics between them. The history we built of stuff the audience doesn’t know, Jodie took it upon herself to make Danvers more of an asshole than written in the previous scripts. It helped me to think about what their relationship was like when they were both okay with each other in the past, and why they hate each other now. We had fun finding the bad humor in Danvers, and how Navarro and Danvers can poke each other with that. It happened organically. It was amazing working with Jodie.

AVC: Do you have a favorite Jodie Foster film?

KR: I liked Contact, and I’m still obsessed with that movie. Obviously Silence Of The Lambs, it’s one of my all-time favorite movies. We have The Accused. We can keep going down. I had a 30-second fangirl moment when she first walked into rehearsal where I tried to play it cool.

AVC: Were you a fan of True Detective before you got the part? How do you deal with the inevitable comparisons to the first one?

KR: I am a huge fan. Like everyone else, I drooled over season one. It’s one of the best TV shows I’ve seen. The second season wasn’t my favorite, but it’s because it was so different from the first, which set a high bar. But I’ve still seen it. And I loved Mahershala Ali in the third season. I know everybody is going to compare season four to the first one, but there are [no comparisons], even if there are some similarities.

You have these True Detective checkpoints where you have the two detectives who can’t stand each other. Check. You have this environment where season one is hot, bright, and sweaty, whereas the fourth is full of cold, dark, freezing secrets. Check. You have individuals whose lives are so screwed up, they bury themselves in their work. Check. You have mystery, you don’t see what’s coming, and you have a screwed-up perspective of a love story. One uses sex as a tool.

I know Issa tried to stick to the themes, and then you bring back the mystical elements that suggest if the suspense is manmade or supernatural. The obvious difference, of course, is it’s two females. You have a female perspective on things, and women identify with victims, perpetrators, situations, and crimes differently. If you liked season one, you might find connecting clues and references in season four.

AVC: With something like Night Country under your belt, what kind of projects are you hoping to do next?

KR: I didn’t grow up seeing faces like mine in the ring or on camera being of mixed race and Afro-Indigenous, or even just Indigenous. We don’t need anyone to tell our stories for us anymore. It’s not that we want to tell only stories of the past, but we have contemporary stories to tell. We have people behind the camera, in the writers’ room, and doing hair and makeup. We’ve been here. My goal, with this and the future, is to make the best out of the opportunities I get, tell the stories that matter, get representation right, and not just do the job because somebody needs to check a box of having an interesting-looking mixed-race person in the room, but [because someone] thinks they have a talented person who fits the part and happens to be mixed race. I want to elevate voices and make the best of this.